Three things from this week.
First. The hardest part of going fractional is not the work. It's that being good at the work stops producing clients on its own.
Inside a company, competence compounds by itself. You do good work, people see it, the next thing finds you (or at least you don’t have to search far for it). On your own that machine of opportunity is gone. You can be the best operator a founder could hire and be completely invisible to the twelve founders who need you this quarter.
I resisted this longer than I should have. Selling myself felt like posturing, and I didn't want to be the guy narrating his own competence on LinkedIn every day. So I did what most fractionals do when the pipeline is thin. I did more. More posts, more coffee chats, more yeses to things I knew weren't a fit, because effort felt like the responsible answer.
Laura Little introduced me to Aly Sanders' work and it really broke down how I should adjust my focus with branding and outreach.
Her core idea is that marketing and sales are an act of service. That sounds soft…but it's the most practical thing I've read on this topic, because it changes what you're actually doing on a call. You're not pitching. You're diagnosing. She makes a distinction between an audit call and a discovery call and they are not the same meeting. A discovery call is you gathering information so you can pitch later. An audit call is a structured diagnostic where the prospect works out on their own that they have a problem and it's costing them. Nobody has to be convinced of anything, because they got there themselves.
For an operator that reframe is everything, as diagnosing is already part of the job. It's what I do in week one of every engagement. I'd just never thought to do it before the contract was signed.
Her guide is called The Give-First Method and it's worth a look.
Second thing. I've been building software. It's called ExecutionIQ and it's deployed and running on live client work right now. It’s given me at least another 60 minutes a day to dedicate to true delivery (or outbound work like above).
What it does: every fractional engagement runs on commitments. Somebody said they'd do something. The entire job is knowing what's owed, who owes it, and how long it's been sitting. That's the Execution Ledger and it's the center of the product. Commitments get captured out of email and 1:1s, tracked with age, and surfaced when they start to rot.
The ledger doesn't just count what you owe. It counts how many times a client had to ask you twice.
Most operators track their commitments. Almost nobody tracks their chase count. And that number is the honest measure of whether you're actually delivering, because it's the one your client is keeping in their head whether you track it or not. I built it, then I looked at my own and it lit a fire under me to deliver even better.
On the build itself. Vibe coding is real. I'm not a developer, and I have a product running that I built in evenings. That was not possible two years ago. But, there's a failure mode and I walked straight into it.
When building is nearly free, you build. Every idea becomes a feature, because implementing it costs twenty minutes instead of a 2 week sprint. Two weeks in I had a thing that did nine jobs adequately and none of them well, and I couldn't have told you in one sentence who it was for.
The constraint that used to protect you was cost. Engineering time was expensive, so somebody senior had to justify every feature. Take the cost away and nothing stops you but you.
So I supply the constraint myself now. Write the one problem in a sentence. Keep a not-doing list longer than the feature list. Sequence the roadmap and park everything that isn't next. Rebuild instead of accumulating, because throwing away two hours of code is nothing and throwing away two months of it is a company.
The tools got fast. Product judgment didn't get any easier, and it's now most of the job.
If you're a fractional operator and any of this sounds like your week, hit reply. I want to talk to you.
Last one. I read something this week that rearranged how I think about my day.
Scene: The author of the book I’ve been reading is at his desk working when his ten-year-old daughter walks in to ask if he keeps a secret stash of balloons in his office, because she needs to borrow one. He asks why on earth he'd have balloons in his office. She says because they're your favorite thing, Dad.
In this chapter, he’s recounting the frustration he felt after being interrupted. And then he writes, “…Don't resent these interruptions, receive them as gifts from tiny prophets who are saving us from being stupidly serious.”
I've been the guy at the desk. My new home office doesn’t have doors yet, and I’m frequently interrupted… my first reaction, if I'm honest, is almost never delight. It's the half second of irritation at losing my place.
And the thing I was doing is usually a spreadsheet.
Mark 10 has the disciples doing exactly what I do. People are bringing their children to Jesus and the disciples start turning them away, because obviously he's busy, he has the actual work to get to. "When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, 'Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.'" (Mark 10:14)
Indignant. Not mildly annoyed. They were guarding his calendar but they were guarding it against the point.
I haven't solved this for my own situation yet, but I'm committing this week to treating every interruption as an opportunity to give thanks for the little humans that brought it.
That's what I've got. Have a great weekend!
Max